Cannabis has been shown to be non-toxic, and has a
robust safety profile
Cannabis often works when other medications fail, so
not only is it generally safer than prescription
drugs, cannabis preparations also tend to provide
greater efficacy
Children with epilepsy can often find rapid relief
using cannabis oil; about 25 percent experience a
significant reduction in seizures within days or
weeks
By Dr. Mercola
Many drugs are developed not because there's a great medical
need, but rather because there's big money to be made from them.
In many cases, holistic therapies and medicines already exist
that can take the place of any number of synthetic
pharmaceuticals. Cannabis is one such therapy, and according to
Dr. Gedde, "it's time to ask questions and look at a new way of
thinking about this plant."
Dr. Gedde is the owner and founder of
Gedde
Whole Health, located in Colorado, and the Clinicians'
Institute of Cannabis Medicine.
"I actually never imagined that I'd be in this
field," she says. "My medical training was
originally in pathology and research, and I spent many years
in the research lab.
My PhD is in biophysical chemistry along with my MD.
I did my training at Stanford, and then I worked in the
pharmaceutical industry. I had no idea that cannabis
actually was medicine."
A wealth of research shows marijuana does indeed have
outstanding promise as a medicinal plant, largely due to its
cannabidiol (CBD) content. Cannabinoids interact with your body
by way of naturally occurring cannabinoid receptors embedded in
cell membranes throughout your body.
There are cannabinoid receptors in your brain, lungs, liver,
kidneys, immune system, and more. Both the therapeutic and
psychoactive properties of marijuana occur when a cannabinoid
activates a cannabinoid receptor.
Setting Up a Medical Practice Around Medical Cannabis
About 10 years ago, Dr. Gedde opened her medical practice to
focus on non-pharmaceutical alternative therapies. But it wasn't
until 2009 that she discovered medical cannabis.
"That was when this whole topic came up in Colorado.
I started to look at the possibility of including
recommendations for [medical cannabis] in my practice.
What I started hearing from my patients really amazed
me. I started hearing about all the benefits and the lack of
toxicity of cannabis.
I learned about the endocannabinoid system, which
helped me understand how it could possibly be true that it
could do all these things without being toxic."
About two years ago, she received her first request from a
parent who wanted to use the high-cannabidiol (CBD),
low-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) form of cannabis for her child's
epileptic seizures.
"I went ahead with that and started to learn about
what this could do. Now, two years later, the news that
cannabis is a therapy for epilepsy has reached the world I
think.
We're very committed to gather ongoing information
about what's happening with these children and to get this
information out to other physicians in a way that they can
use and understand.
We want to generate high-quality, publishable data
from practice and our experience. We want to help people
understand the background and the scientific basis of what
cannabis can do, and really start to understand that it's a
medicine, and bring it into what we have as medicine,"
she says.
Cannabis Basics
The cannabis plant contains cannabidiol (CBD) and
tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Both have medicinal properties, but
whereas THC has psychoactive activity that can make you feel
"stoned," CBD does not. The whole plant also contains a variety
of terpenes that have medicinal properties as well.
Through traditional plant breeding and seed exchanges,
growers have started producing cannabis plants for medical use
that have higher levels of CBD and lower levels of THC. Dr.
Allan Frankel, a board-certified internist in California who
treats patients with medical cannabis, works with a number of
CBD-rich strains.
CBD is currently a Schedule 1 controlled substance, which
means:
The drug or other substance has a high potential for
abuse
The drug or other substance has no currently accepted
medical use in treatment in the US
There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug
or other substance under medical supervision
There's no doubt that CBD needs to be rescheduled, as each of
these three points are blatantly wrong.
"The place to advocate, in my opinion, would be on
the federal level," Dr. Gedde says. "Advocate for
the rescheduling of cannabis. It's currently listed as a
Schedule I—very dangerous substance. To match its actual
safety and toxicity profile, it should be at a much lower
schedule. If it was moved, three major things would happen:
(1) Physicians would be able to prescribe cannabis.
Doctors could actually help their patients to get the exact
thing that they need without the sort of situation where
patients are required to find their own source.
(2) Physicians can do actual clinical research. You
can't do an approved human study with a substance that the
federal government says is highly dangerous. It's not
permitted. If it's rescheduled, doctors can now do actual
clinical research, which has been prohibited.
(3) We could potentially get insurance coverage for
cannabis, which would be very important for people to be
able to really benefit from it."
She also suggests talking to your state legislators. At
present, 23 states have legalized medical marijuana.1
Another 11 states have pending legislation for 2015.2
Awareness is starting to shift, and many are now starting to
recognize the medical value of cannabis. Even the US Surgeon
General recently spoke out in favor of
medical marijuana.
His statement echoes a growing sentiment in the medical and
scientific communities that the health benefits of marijuana
should no longer be ignored. But there are still many hurdles,
and many states still have strict laws against its usage—even in
terminal patients.
This is a
Flash-based video and may not be viewable on mobile devices.
How Does Cannabis Compare to Prescription Drugs?
A number of prescription drugsare well
known to be dangerous. Pharmaceuticals in general are among the
leading causes of death in the US, and some drugs have
killed tens of thousands of individuals. The painkiller
Vioxx is one classic example that killed over 60,000 before
being pulled off the market.
According to Dr. Gedde, cannabis is certainly far safer than
most prescription drugs, and there's enough information to
compare it against the known toxicities of many drugs currently
in use. This includes liver and kidney toxicity,
gastrointestinal damage, nerve damage and, of course, death.
Moreover, cannabidiol and other cannabis products often work
when other medications fail, so not only are they generally
safer, cannabis preparations also tend to provide greater
efficacy.
As noted by Dr. Gedde:
"There's an ongoing death rate from use of pain
medications as prescribed. So, even as prescribed, they're
highly dangerous and they are open to abuse. As far as
medications used in the pediatric population to control
seizures, there are also severe toxicities to organs. Many
of them are very sedating. The children become unable to
function or really to interact because of the sedating
effects. Other medications have a side effect of rage and
behavioral problems.
Unprovoked rage is actually a known side effect of
some of the anti-seizure medications. Cannabis and in
particular cannabidiol has none of these issues. No
toxicities. The main side effect of cannabidiol is
sleepiness. As a child gets accustomed to it, that does wear
off and the child can be very alert and functional on the
cannabis oil once they have worked into the dosing. Once you
put them against each other, there really is no comparison
in terms of safety."
Cannabis for Seizure Control in Children
In Dr. Gedde's experience, about 25 percent of children
experience a rapid reduction in seizures when given cannabis
oil—sometimes within days, or weeks. But results do vary, and
not every child will respond well in the immediate term. She
notes that some children are so sensitized to medications that
they need to start at a very low dose, and give it plenty of
time to work.
"We are working out in the clinical practice the
protocols that seem to give the best benefit the most
quickly to the most children, but we do find that some
children get results very quickly. For others, it takes more
time, up to a number of months," she says.
There's limited information on using cannabis in children for
issues other than epilepsy. However, in January 2015, the
American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) updated their policy
statement on marijuana,3
acknowledging that cannabinoids from marijuana "may currently be
an option for… children with life-limiting or severely
debilitating conditions and for whom current therapies are
inadequate."
The main objection of pediatricians at the Children's
Hospital in Denver to using CBD in children—even for conditions
like uncontrolled seizures—is that there are no studies in
children of potential harms of long-term use of CBD
(cannabidiol). There might be long term adverse effects of CBD
and other cannabinoids that we will only come to discover later.
"This is a good point in my view, and a reason not to
suggest use of CBD as a dietary supplement or as a general
"health tonic" for children," Dr. Gedde says. "In
my view, it is important to weigh the use of a therapy,
including potential risks not known, against the risks of
the uncontrolled illness itself and of other therapies in
use. For many patients, even with incomplete information
about CBD, weighing those risks including known toxic
effects of their current therapies does point to at least a
therapeutic trial with CBD being a good choice."
Potential Side Effects of Medical Cannabis
According to Dr. Gedde, the main side effect you need to
watch out for is the psychoactivity of THC, i.e. its ability to
make you "high." However, she also stresses that THC actually
has many valuable medical benefits, so depending on your
problem, you may want higher or lower levels of THC. For
example, in patients who suffer with severe pain, where the
perception of pain causes great distress, the psychoactivity of
THC allows the patient to shift their perception of the pain in
their mind and body.
"That's an example where the psychoactivity is
needed, but there are other areas where it's not. Selection
of the type of product, the actual cannabinoids in it, and
the mode of using it is very helpful for dealing with that
side effect," she says. "Beyond that, and the kind
of distress that excessive psychoactivity [can cause] if
somebody gets too much, cannabis is very safe. There are no
known deaths linked with it. That cannot be said about
virtually anything else on the planet, including water. You
can overdose on water and die. You can't get enough cannabis
in your body to kill you."
US Government Holds Patent on Cannabis as a Neuroprotectant
Interestingly, the US government, through the Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS), holds a patent on cannabis,
specifically on cannabidiol (CBD) as a neuroprotectant and an
antioxidant. This patent was filed over a decade ago, and was
approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in 2003.
The patent was based on studies done with the support of the
National Institutes of Health (NIH).
"It certainly is a paradox. Through the Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA), the US federal government
holds the stance that marijuana has no medical value and is
highly dangerous; whereas we have in fact scientific
evidence that it is useful as a medicine, and that far from
being dangerous, it's actually quite non-toxic and
supportive—certainly in comparison to other medications.
I think we have to ask why we have this split. It
really seems like a policy, especially in certain areas of
the federal government that would encompass the drug war and
drug laws. That type of policy certainly is not consistent
with our medical knowledge and scientific knowledge."
Education Is Key
Many people ask how they can educate themselves about
cannabis, and Dr. Gedde notes that it can be a difficult
proposition despite the fact that there are numerous
peer-reviewed publications about the benefits of cannabis.
"The reason why it's difficult is that the
preponderance of research funds has been to show harms
related to cannabis as a drug of abuse... [L]ook for the
real research that's there on the endocannabinoid system and
the ways that marijuana cannabis has been helping people for
centuries. And look into the history of medical practice;
that's where the information starts to come out."
It's also helpful to look at current clinical practice, which
is possible in a few states, including Colorado, where cannabis
is safely and legally accessible. This is where you can learn
more about appropriate dosing, and the methods of use that have
been found to be effective for a range of different conditions.
"[T]he story about marijuana and cannabis that we've been
told has been very one-sided," she says, "and there's a
lot more to the story. There's a lot of potential benefit
there."
One reputable source where you can find research relating to
the use of cannabis is cancer.gov.4,5
This is the US government's site on cancer. You can also peruse
the medical literature through PubMed,6
which is a public resource. The Journal of Pain,7
a publication by the American Pain Society, has a long list of
studies on the pain-relieving effects of cannabis and would
certainly seem worth the effort for anyone with chronic pain to
utilize.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse,8
which also has information relating to the medicinal aspects of
marijuana, preclinical and clinical trials are under way to test
marijuana and various extracts for the treatment of a number of
diseases, including autoimmune diseases such as multiple
sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease;
inflammation; pain; and mental disorders. To learn more, I
also recommend listening to my previous interview with Dr.
Frankel, in which he discusses many of the
medical benefits of cannabis.
Copyright 1997- 2015 Dr. Joseph Mercola. All Rights Reserved.